‘Onto the garden! Huh!’
‘Well then, I’ve heard they’ve got a walking group and we saw on the way that the gardens and houses round here are very pretty.’
‘But it’s hilly,’ she whimpers.
God turn me into an amiable old cat when I’m senile…with a humane, non-autistic vet nearby. My dentist’s autistic; I wouldn’t want to be dispatched by him.
Kees yells, ‘Well, let’s come along den and join de others. Dey’re having deir afternoon tea; Sister Angela is playing the piano and someone’s come in to sing.’
Stella knows it’s just about her last chance, so she puts the Walkathon down purposefully on the carpeted floor and rickets along in its wake. The dining room is broad and long and light, the main room of the old house in its park-like surrounds. The old people are sitting in groups of about eight around tables neatly set with white cloths and light blue china tea things and up on a raised stage by the furthest windows, little Sister Angela in a cardie, skirt and flatties that only just reach the pedals is playing incidental tunes crisply and well while she waits for the singer who’s probably the old bloke we saw having a gargle near the tropical fish tank in the hallway. A number of the religious here are obviously retired teachers and so they are articulate and have some skills. That’s surely a plus? Whatever Stella thinks. I’ve actually seen talking in groups in this place.
Oh please, Stella, please, just like it for my sake. I know it’s you who has to live here, but everything else I’ve seen is so drear or inappropriate, so waiting-for-death. Why does it have to be my decision? I suppose you would say, ‘Well, it was you who decided to sell my house!’ And you’d be right. I sold it sooner than sell my own, but when we moved back to Melbourne, because the Siècle Trust put caveats on Dadda’s paintings and we were unable to sell them, I was forced to sell mine, too. If I was cruel and high-handed with you, I had to do the same thing to myself – we were forced to rethink. It sometimes happens. Sometimes there just isn’t the money in the kitty to provide the things you need. Sometimes you have to change the things you need to fit the kitty and we did change them, Stella. You bought your cottage and I bought mine. And now yours is gone because you are too old to live in it and we needed the money for your care and because the care failed you, here we are…
The woman in charge of the leisure program, Rosa, comes up to us, looking to me like the real version of what Hollywood idealised in Sophia Loren – curvily and lustily Italian, the hooped earrings, the dark hair bronzed to hide the grey, the lips full and riding her face like a boat on a pleasure trip. She has the accent of first generation. She says, ‘Wailcome, Stella,’ and sashays on ahead of us to the table where we are to sit. Some of the people I met on my preliminary visit last week are sitting here: a teaching sister from country Victoria called Sister Colleen who can’t be much older than I am, a little old Babushka doll of a Russian woman and an ample woman of about eighty with a moon-shaped face, called Mary, who seems especially pleased to see us and sympathetic about our dilemma with the Protestants. ‘It’s cruel,’ says Mary, ‘downright cruel. It won’t happen here, Stella, just you come and live with us.’ The Babushka nods smilingly in agreement and Mary adds, ‘We’ve got Sister Colleen to protect us, haven’t we Sister?’
Sister Colleen says, ‘Welcome Stella,’ in the accent of eighth generation, and holds out her hand to squeeze Stella’s. Stella winces in pain because her arthritic nodes are tender, but Sister Colleen just runs her tongue up under her top lip, chasing a crumb, and says, ‘God helps those who help themselves, Mary.’
‘Oh he mightn’t notice us if you didn’t speak up, Sister,’ titters Mary as Stella sits down clumsily, put off balance by the handshake.
‘We were taught to speak up in my order,’ goes Sister Colleen above the clack and bumble of cups and cake.
‘Well, you’ve got a good example to follow.’
Sister Colleen nods. ‘She means Mary MacKillop,’ she explains to me. ‘She’s going to be our first saint.’
Perhaps this remark isn’t met with universal approval, because across the table from Sister Colleen is a severe, thin, blue-rinsed person who shoots her an under-brow look from the rim of a dainty cup that doesn’t match the rest, all colourless irises and drawstring mouth. ‘That’s all still in the hands of God, Sister,’ she chides.
‘Just a formality now, Mother Oldmeadow.’ Sister Colleen sits back, crosses her bare legs with the comfy sandals on the extremities, looks at my mother and says of Mother Oldmeadow, ‘This is Mother Oldmeadow, Stella, formerly headmistress of a big city convent.’
‘Ew,’ says my mother, overcome with hierarchy. ‘How do you do, Mother Oldmeadow?’ To which Mother Oldmeadow nods in superior fashion, willing her mouth to loosen into the primmest of smiles.
Sister Colleen rides on over the top of the introduction, ‘Out in the country if you don’t ask, you don’t get.’
‘Shhh,’ goes the Reverend Mother, mouth back in a pucker, as ‘I will take you home again, Kathleen…’ rises mellifluously from the breast of the old Irish gargler. ‘Across the waters wild and wide…’ and we could be on a ship, having drawn a mixed bunch at our table. A newcomer to the table, an observant old lady with thin, hairdressed hair, lounging cheeks and bright blue eyes up under a theatrical drapery of skin reaches across, takes Stella’s diseased hand and soothes, because a tear is trickling down the bridge of Stella’s nose and lands, ker-plop, in her cup of tea.
God knows…is it the sentimental old song – one of her martyred brothers was a tenor – or is it the unAnglicanness of the place? There’s a plaster Mary wreathed in white lilies in the foyer. Or is it sheer exhaustion? I can never keep track of Stella, an ancient child, still obedient to her long-dead mother who must have been one of the great moral tyrants of the universe. Where on earth did Stella hope to end her days? She made no plans, named no preferences, just let it all happen and complained at every turn.
Or didn’t I listen? I drew the line at recruiting an Anglican vicar for her while she was still at large: her local parish was famously against the ordination of women. She might be, too, for all I know. Anyway, I couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy of her having lived for years within cooee of the Anglicans and never going to them. Well, I suppose it was hypocrisy or maybe it’s just convenient now for me to sit here thinking ‘hypocrite’. She never had the nerve to go, that was the problem. She would have liked me to go for her.
Rosa-Sophia sashays by with scones and cream; Stella leaves off looking balefully at the blue-eyed lady, removes her hand, grabs and scoffs a whole scone so gluttonously she gets cream up her nostrils. That makes her laugh, trying to stop herself from exploding, grabbing for serviettes, rocking back and forth. The blue-eyed lady is laughing too as the song comes to an end and people applaud. ‘You’ll fit in,’ she goes. ‘Bring her back here, lovey, she’ll be at home.’
‘But I’m not a Catholic,’ goes my mother.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ says the lady, ‘Edna over there’s not a Catholic.’
My mother, face dripping scone, cranes her head around to look at Edna. Edna is very drab on the eye, as if she were the only virtuous person at a Bacchanalian knees-up. The sight of her brings on a laughing fit. ‘Hey Bel.’ Stella turns to me. ‘Edna could be one of Aunt Nina’s deputies out collecting for the Maimed and Limbless. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’ Then, with a rising voice, she announces to the company, ‘My sister Nina was a so-sigh-etty woman, y’know. Spent her life raising money for good causes.’ Another set of companions in different surroundings would have asked, ‘Oh?’ and given her the opportunity of raving on while they drank her wine or pitted their origins against hers, but here, the drawstring lips on Mother Oldmeadow pucker to a nipple of disapproval, she rises to her feet, rests on her stick, turns and makes her way out, leaving Stella disconcerted.
‘Oh don’t worry,’ goes her new blue-eyed friend – who’s called Loreto – flicking an indicative glance at Mother Oldmeadow. ‘Some p
eople are against Sister Angela’s playing.’
‘Oh?’ say I, thinking it more likely that Mother Oldmeadow is against Stella. ‘Sister Angela seems to play very well.’ And I think of Ray back at Narrowlea, whose racket on the pianola once sent a visiting dog running for cover.
‘Some prefer not to hear the old tunes. A bit too lowly for them. Mother Oldmeadow was the superior at a swank ladies’ college,’ says Loreto, repeating what we’ve already heard.
This sets Stella off at a gallop. ‘I’m an old boy of Scunthorpe Boys’ Grammar,’ she goes, ‘I was brought up on a prop-er-ty out Scunthorpe way. They took the sisters of the boys. We had a headmaster whose brother liked to tipple. He taught us English, his name was William Wentworth Tees and he used to say a poem about himself, “Here lie the bones of W.W., Never more to trouble you, trouble you.” We had a kleptomaniac in our class. Her name was Jill Hitchen – the Hitchens were prominent Anglicans. Jill had bad breath and dandruff flakes the size of autumn leaves. People she was visiting were warned to put small, tempting objects out of her reach…’
‘Really?’ says Loreto. ‘I went to the parish school in Croydon. I’m only named after a posh convent.’
Her voice varying in intensity as she tests her listener for the level of interest, Stella continues with the Hitchens, people of social standing in Scunthorpe, but not people who stood as high as the Mottes. She has had ninety-eight years of life to beat into submission and it is still recalcitrant; it still doesn’t obey her rules. If it did, she would be drinking pink gin in Clarence House, which would have been left to her by her ‘first cousin four times removed’, the late Elizabeth Windsor, née Bowes-Lyons. If life obeyed Stella’s rules, the Queen Mother would have written by this, claiming her as the lost branch of the family – the branch that the current lords of Glamis Castle were just waiting to be dispossessed by, the branch from the son of the tenth earl whose parents were married when he was nine, the day before the earl’s death. So there!
Loreto laughs and laughs, but it may be at Stella’s face rather than her stories as not only is it spotted with cream but every expression in a very big pantheon is traipsing across it. Stella will defend her patch until her last breath. What we are witnessing is the penultimate utterances of a daughter whose mother sought to exclude the lower classes from her life by the repetition ad nauseum of acceptable words and pronunciations, at their worst when bundled into verses such as We have a mulberry tree, We have a persimmon tree, but we do not have a laver tree – sayings that shrink-wrap her world to a suffocating core of prohibitions in the midst of which she sits, fighting for breath as she spits out the long, loopy mantra. Surely someone, some day, will understand: surely she will be rescued before, as W. W. taught her ‘… the curfew tolls the knell of parting day…’
Old pathways in the mind have been brushed off: quotations and verses I have not heard for years come tremulously out – even some that I haven’t heard before emerge from where they’ve been stuck in the molasses of her childhood…until the afternoon-tea takers are tottering off and I am marshalling her, still reciting, but desperate now that the audience has dispersed, to the car.
With a final flourish on our way back to Narrowlea and bitterly because she seems to have been overrun by history, she recites: ‘Out flew the web and floated wide/ The mirror crack’d from side to side/ ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried/ The Lady of Shallot.’ For, whatever her views on Catholicism, Heaven, Hell and the class structure of Australian society, she has signed the paper that will very soon make her a resident of Holy Redeemer.
An email from Nin. Nothing about David in it, but could I have Daniel to stay tonight? Could I come over and fetch him? Doesn’t say why and, when I ring, doesn’t answer the phone. Damn the young! I stick myself in the car, fuming, but that doesn’t clarify anything. Nin’s usually quite good with letting me know in advance when she’s going to lumber me with the child. I’ll have to get straight with her and tell her that explanations ease the psychological burden. It’s not that I don’t love Dan. He’s a great little boy. Generally three-year-olds are as their imaginations expand and they make their wonderful grasps at language. I’m keen on the company of a three-year-old for half a day; I can go even longer before resentment starts to show its ugly head, but there are times when I’ve had Dan for twelve hours at a stretch when only three or four were requested and I feel I’m back in the baby glug of Eli’s childhood when laundry detergent in refillable plastic containers threatened to crown the mountains of my wonder. Nin is a ditherer; she has no timetable and when she gets stuck into something, she forgets what time it is – like, just as valuable to me as it is to her.
It’s some time now since Nin tried for a second child and miscarried. She was depressed by it and decided to put off going back to her work as a coordinator with a firm of arts consultants and stay home with Dan for a while. I don’t know that it was the best decision she could have made, but she was finding she didn’t get along with her boss, one of those women who make it difficult for the young mothers on their staff by giving them more work than they can complete in the flexible hours they’re supposed to work. So Nin has been at home testing the employment regulations to their limits. To help out, I had Daniel one day a week up until the week before my exhibition, but since then, my schedule has been thrown out by Stella’s relocation and I’ve had to renege temporarily. Maybe the briefest of all possible emails is part of my punishment for being human.
Nin and Wendy live in a northern suburb where you don’t often see men pushing the prams and on the rare occasions you do see them, there’ll be two men pushing one child. The children are children: sucking dummies, screeching in supermarkets, dropping their school projects into the gutter as they climb out of the car or marching into the playground full of pride with a colourful board under their arms. Parents drop them off in the mornings, also full of pride and watching them go, pressing lunch boxes on them and hats and slapping sunscreen on their faces. In the afternoons, it’s often grannies who wait on the footpath with littler folk in strollers and the avalanche takes to the streets and parks to play the games that children have always played – climbing, pirating from upper decks, slipping down slides or corralling the old folks on the seats with, ‘I’m hungry’, or ‘Can we buy some lollies?’ or, on the times when I’ve been among them with Daniel, ‘Will you be the prisoner?’ This is a demographic where the children who aren’t first generation refugees are conceived by turkey baster or by the biological clock on agreement that there will be a partner in evidence to support the mother in the arduous task of child-rearing. The breeding set rent houses with two, preferably three, bedrooms from absent speculators who bought in the eighties boom, renovated and leased to mature-age students: this clientele has since graduated but been unable to afford to buy because the stock is depleted and the price of housing within striking range of the city has soared. The speculators are now millionaires, often offshore millionaires, and the breeding set are at their mercy. The back of Nin and Wendy’s house, although it looks swank, is actually parting company with the front because the extension (out into the postmodern backyard with what used to be symmetrical high hedges of pittosporum, symmetrical paving stones and interstitial grass over which nature has reasserted her predominance in a gloomy, spiky and untidy kind of way) is on a separate concrete slab underneath which the drought has played havoc with the soil. Nature has caused ostensibly unmendable, handspan wide gaps to open up between the rooms on the slab and the sitting room.
It is into the sitting room that I have walked with six bottles of brined olives to smooth my passage, it being November, when the pickling is finished after six months of sitting in a dark place and sometimes being turned along with the chillis and lemon slices that all came from Mick’s garden. Yes, I do paint, but I also pickle.
I know that the olives are there to avoid the issue of Nin’s secretiveness versus my curiosity, but I’d rather advert to gardening than to pain to begin my desce
nt to the nitty-gritty. I have summoned up my garden karma from my suburban cupboardful of karmas and I have a picture of my olive tree in the corner of Mick’s country garden firmly in my mind. Gardening is almost as satisfactory a diversion from what ought to be happening as science used to be, but it tastes nice as opposed to bringing in money. You can experiment in a garden and you can learn. Daniel’s mothers are all for organically grown foodstuffs, so I’m doing my best to stay on side by being politically correct and working at insects and blight with tea-leaves, soap, organic pest oil, lemon juice and garlic spray. I am trying to fit in. Wendy’s mother, though a climate change enthusiast, is an insect exterminator and tells Daniel to stamp on snails. But Daniel rather likes a snail and at my place we have snail races across the lid of a compost bin and we look for snail neonates under bricks and once we saw a giant slug laying her pearly eggs from under her mantle into a pile of flower pots. We loved it; we watched week by week as the baby slugs developed and, when they reached seedling-devouring size, we popped them over the back fence into the next door neighbour’s derelict backyard.
I have rescued Mick’s garden from the aftermath of the Battle of Marital Breakdown and, with visions of a healthy family, I’ve planted trees and reared crops as pesticide freely as I can, given that I first chose to grow apples and reared instead codling moths in exportable quantities.
Nin is looking a bit shamefaced. Apparently Daniel packed his bag this morning, spat the dummy and said he was tired of his mothers and was off to stay with me. She is hooking her flexible be-socked toes around the edge of a just-visible coffee table where newspapers, crayons and jagged bits of paper that Daniel has been cutting out to make puppets are struggling against the laws of nature to stay on board. It’s as though a willy-willy has just been through and transposed three lifestyles. A boy’s shoe in the fruit bowl, a line of drying bras and pants on the back of the couch where Nin is sitting, a broom athwart the floorboards, many heaps of flattish things toppling because they are not all of the same flatness – like ring binders and slippery video covers, a child’s plastic art smock, camera lenses, padded post bags, three or four magnifying glasses, industrial earphones, teaspoons united by yoghurt to the sides of cups and a camera or two.
Window Gods Page 13
